The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Ivory Clark and his family were still driving around New Orleans as the afternoon went on. Clark’s vehicle was a blue Dodge Intrepid, not quite big enough for seven people—but his family made do. For about an hour, Clark cruised up and down thoroughfares in New Orleans, looking for a vacancy in a hotel or motel. Eventually, he found a room at the Grand Palace Hotel, a frayed 212-room high-rise at the junction of Claiborne Avenue and Canal Street. Although the lobby was seedy and the Clarks’ room on the fifth floor smelled of stale cigarette smoke, the family felt blessed to have found a safe harbor at the last minute. As Ivory stretched out on a worn old chair, he comforted himself that his family was safe. And well provided for: he had brought along Popeye’s fried chicken for dinner, along with Gatorade, Twinkies, Slim Jims, Cracker Jack, Chips Ahoy, and other snacks. It wasn’t the gourmet fare he would have made in his own kitchen, but it was food. As the patriarch, he had done his job in protecting his family. Contented, he dozed off in an old chair.67

  Ben and Sarah Jaffe had good reason not to speed out of New Orleans in advance of Katrina. They were members of the family that owned and operated Preservation Hall, the temple of New Orleans jazz located on St. Peter Street in the French Quarter. On Sunday, while Ben was running around the city getting last-minute supplies, Sarah visited Preservation Hall, removing valuable Noel Rockmore paintings and old promotion posters from the venerable stone walls. Convinced that the building was secure, the Jaffes then went looking for their veteran jazz musicians, many of whom were well along in years. Such aging musicians were, to the Jaffes’ way of thinking, all part of the Preservation Hall fraternity. “We were particularly worried about Marvin Kimbel,” Sarah recalled. “He’s a banjo player who performed with Preservation Hall [Jazz Band] up until five years ago, when he had a stroke.”68

  Unable to perform anymore, Kimbel was bedridden in his home Uptown on Calhoun Street, with his wife, Lillian, who was ninety-four and blind. “They had live-in nurses, but were still calling their own shots,” Sarah Jaffe said. “We went up to their house on Sunday afternoon and spent several hours convincing Mrs. Kimbel to get out of town and to get Mr. Kimbel out. They just didn’t want to leave. They’ve seen a lot of hurricanes come and go. But we finally convinced their nurses to pack them up and put them in a car bound for Baton Rouge. We gave them $400. The nurse was like, ‘I can’t drive to Baton Rouge. I’m afraid of heights.’ And we’re like, ‘What do you mean?’ She says, ‘I can’t get on the interstate.’ So she took the long River Road route to Baton Rouge. It took them twelve hours, but they made it! We had a room ready for them at the Marriott Courtyard.”69

  During the day on Sunday, President Bush responded to requests from Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Alabama Governor Bob Riley, declaring emergencies in both states.70 Barbour and Riley were both Republicans; and Barbour, a native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, was a longtime Bush crony. He was, in fact, a fixture in the Republican hierarchy. He had served nearly two years in the Reagan White House as director of the Office of Political Affairs. From 1993 to January 1997, Barbour was chairman of the Republican National Committee. During his tenure, Republicans won control of both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years. It was the greatest midterm majority sweep of the twentieth century. Gregarious, stubborn, and possessed with enough backroad grittiness to be an Ole Miss football coach, the silver-haired Barbour understood in the pre-Katrina hours that hurricanes—as dreaded and as horrific as they were—could also produce long-range economic benefits for a region. The important post-Katrina goals, from his perspective, would be to induce the federal government to pony up for disaster relief and then use the storm as an opening by which he might deregulate industries. Barbour couldn’t help but see such possibilities. Nothing about him smacked of the quitter. He was, pure and simple, a master angler.

  Still, Barbour was no more forceful than Governor Blanco in next-door Louisiana in utilizing his own mandated powers. To some extent, he was hampered from taking the drastic action required by the fact that 37 percent of Mississippi’s National Guard were stationed in Iraq. As it was, Barbour called up only 850 troops in anticipation of Katrina. Like Nagin in New Orleans, he also waited until Sunday to declare a mandatory evacuation.71

  Governor Riley, making sure that Alabama’s fifty-three-mile coastline wasn’t neglected, also declared a state of emergency. He had asked President Bush to issue an “expedited major disaster declaration” in six Alabama counties. Between 1959 and 1999, in fact, Alabama experienced forty-four hurricanes, with low-lying peninsulas, spits, and lagoons often getting hammered. Riley was particularly worried about the more than 56,000 Alabama residents who lived south of I-10 in such vulnerable areas as Dauphin Island and Bayou La Batre, places that, it had been calculated, got brushed or hit by a hurricane every 3.53 years.72 Mobile was also a concern because 129,000 people lived in the downtown area, many along the waterfront. “The primary threat posed by Hurricane Katrina is going to be flooding from storm surge,” Governor Riley told the Associated Press. “So those being evacuated just need to make sure they reach higher ground.”73

  VIII

  The staff of the Hancock Medical Center in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, didn’t wait for any official directive on the subject of Katrina. On Sunday afternoon, administrators there held a “Code White” meeting. Normally just an exercise, a Code White was an emergency drill staged in anticipation of a terrorist attack or a natural disaster. The hospital’s doctors, nurses, and administrators convened in the room designated as the emergency operations center. The chief administrator, CEO Hal Leftwich, gave everybody a choice, not unlike the one handed down at the Alamo in 1836: stay or go. Some of the hospital’s employees had to choose the latter, citing responsibilities to children or elderly parents. Most chose to stay, though, including emergency room physicians Sean Applewood, Ronnie Ali, Jeff Giddens, and Fredro Knight. “That Code White meeting is forever buried in my memory,” said Janet McQueen, the hospital’s public relations director. “It was heartbreaking to see how many of our doctors and nurses were going to help those hurt by Katrina.”74

  Since the hospital was located a good two miles from the shore and sat 27 feet above sea level, flooding from the storm surge was not a serious consideration. With the NHC reports that winds might be as high as 180 mph, the greatest fear was that the roof might blow off the three-story building. The hospital thus began a lockdown period shortly after the Code White meeting. Under Leftwich’s direction, the staff spent Sunday afternoon moving all of the thirty-three remaining patients from the ground floor onto the upper two floors. “We discharged as many patients as we could, telling them to go home and evacuate while they still could,” Leftwich later recalled from his office. “The ambulance service came and got our ICU patients and transferred them to a hospital in Hattiesburg.”75

  Thirty-four-year-old Fredro Knight had arrived at the Hancock Medical Center at around three in the afternoon to work the overnight shift. He was a first-rate ER doctor who received his degree at the University of Chicago. Quick-witted, deeply caring, and good-natured in the extreme, Knight had been sought after by recruiters in New York, Los Angeles, and every major hospital in between. But he was a Gulf South man, born and raised in Mobile. He had done his undergraduate work at Xavier University in New Orleans, fallen in love with the city, and decided to make its West Bank neighborhood of Algiers his home. His mother, however, had recently suffered a severe stroke and he didn’t like being too far away from her bedside in Mobile. So he split the geographical distance in half: Bay St. Louis was a long hour’s drive from both New Orleans and Mobile. “Although the storm wasn’t due to hit until Monday morning, I knew that, when I got off Katrina would be hitting,” he recalled. “I knew I wasn’t going to be able to leave. Then I was scheduled for Monday night and Tuesday night, so those were my regular scheduled shifts. The ER was going to be open, so I came from Algiers prepared to stay. I brought a little overnight bag.”76

  Nothing
about Katrina had Knight worried that evening. He didn’t rattle easily. As a child he had been an extreme sports fanatic. He raced bicycles, jumped off roofs, and in high school lettered in varsity baseball, football, and basketball from his sophomore year onward. Fear was seldom his companion. A dead ringer for a thin Denzel Washington, Knight was the star quarterback at his high school. He received football scholarships from five or six colleges, including Tulane University. Unfortunately, during his senior year, while playing third base, he dove for a ball and broke a rib, which pierced his kidney. “I was in real pain, peeing blood all the time,” he recalled. “I was only seventeen years old and needed surgery. My mother refused to let me play college sports.”

  Since age nine, Knight had visited emergency rooms numerous times, getting stitched up for one thing or another. In fact, his pediatrician, Fay Roberts, had become like a second mom. “I knew that when I went to see Fay she’d make me feel better,” he recalled. “So all I associated with medicine was making people feel better. That was my young image of what a physician did—and that is why I became a doctor.”77

  As for hurricanes, he’d experienced them with stark regularity since childhood. They’d blow in and out of Mobile, whooshing objects about, and then it was all over. In the four years Knight had worked at Hancock Medical Center, there had been six or seven lockdowns. These had become routine. Whatever ER doctors were on the schedule at the witching hour were locked in. “You’d come in, bring an overnight bag, the storm may hit, there’s a rumbling through the actual course of the hurricane, then a day or two later, you’d go home,” Knight said. “Our hospital was well built and during most storms all we lost was a roof shingle or two.”78

  Two of the nurses who worked regularly with Knight, Sydney Saucier and Angie Gambino, drove to Hancock Medical Center together on Sunday with carry-on bags. They were in Gambino’s fire-engine-red Dodge Durango, a four-wheel-drive SUV, which they thought would allow them to maneuver unimpeded in high water. As they headed to the hospital on Sunday for the lockdown, they checked off all the personal items they had brought: change of clothes, blankets, pillows, flashlights, lots of snacks, and chocolate. They laughed a lot and they were well fortified. “When we got to the hospital, we tried to get everybody bedded down,” Saucier recalled. “We tried to assign rooms for the staff to sleep. You have staff from all departments, nursing, respiratory, radiology, housekeepers…. So you try to keep track of everybody. The patients that we had on the second floor, we thought it would be a good idea to move them downstairs because we didn’t know how the power would do with the strong winds.”79

  Forty-seven-year-old Saucier grew up in Ethiopia, where her father worked as a TWA pilot. She spent her teenage years in Biloxi. With blond hair cut in a short pixie style and an endearing Diane Keaton–like twitter, she made everybody in a room feel at ease. There wasn’t a mean bone in her body. She had taken her associate’s degree at Jefferson Davis Community College in Biloxi, and then earned a master’s degree at the University of Phoenix in New Orleans. At the time of Katrina she was medical unit manager, overseeing sixteen employees and fifty-seven beds, often dealing with cardiacs, diabetics, and pneumonias. “Basically, Sunday night, we tried to get everybody settled down,” Saucier recalled. “And we did. We were in good spirits.”

  Saucier’s buddy, Angie Gambino, was everybody’s best friend. She could be gentle or bawdy, supportive or wild, reassuring or a hellion. But she was always, whatever the mood of the moment, trying to lift morale. “We had five ICU patients left on Sunday,” she recalled. “Nobody was on a ventilator. There were post-op surgery patients and we had a lovely lady about to give birth. But we had six doctors and plenty of staff. I wasn’t too worried. We could handle the situation.”80

  Bay St. Louis had established an EOC at the city and county civil defense center, but all of the sick or wounded in Hancock County would end up at their hospital. For the most part, Sunday was a pretty uneventful night for the two nurses. They kept looking out the windows to make sure the streetlights were on—they were. They’d check the Weather Channel regularly. They’d call their husbands to learn the newest Katrina coordinates. They made sure coastal friends were all right. “The wind was kind of blustery,” Saucier recalled. “There was mist and rain, so it would kind of swirl, like a Winnie the Pooh cartoon. But we all, including Dr. Knight, got some rest. We knew Monday was going to be a long, unpredictable day.”81

  IX

  At 4 P.M. Sunday, the first rains of the hurricane began to fall in Louisiana. By that point, those left in the danger zone had only two choices: stay at home or split the Katrina threat in half by way of a partial evacuation.

  Local officials in the parishes surrounding New Orleans felt pretty good about the contra-flow evacuation as the bands of rain started blowing across coastal Louisiana. In Jefferson Parish, as many as 65 percent of residents were thought to have left. In New Orleans, the proportion was even higher, approaching 80 percent. Mayor Nagin went to his own refuge—a room on the twenty-seventh floor at the Hyatt Regency on Poydras Street—congratulating himself that under his aegis, the city boasted the highest evacuation rate in its long and hurricane-prone history. Governor Blanco’s contra-flow had worked; Nagin could ride on those coattails. His mantra, in fact, became “80 percent.” He had been a baseball player at Tuskegee and knew that batting .800 was phenomenal—Ted Williams or Willie Mays never dreamed of such an average.

  But what about the 20 percent who were left behind because they didn’t own a vehicle or were sick or were waiting for their checks? Or those in nursing homes? Obviously, Nagin didn’t think they were City Hall’s responsibility. All he could do was shrug about the folks who didn’t flee. “Que será, será,” as they say in Spanish. At any rate, it had been a hard Sunday. What was most astonishing, however, was that Nagin had abandoned City Hall, where the official Emergency Operations Center had been created on the ninth floor, for the supposed safety of a high-rise hotel. His excuse for jumping ship was weak. “I remember us coming over here [City Hall] first and my security guards were a little concerned about the building,” Nagin recalled. “The swaying of the building. So we decided to go over to the Hyatt.” Nagin’s rationale was nonsensical. Why leave a nine-story swaying building for a twenty-seven-story one? Obviously the Hyatt was going to sway more than City Hall.82 Apparently City Hall was a suitable place for the police, RTA officials, hospital administrators, National Guard, et al., to gather and work in unison, but not the all-important Mayor Nagin. His police force was already in disarray, many having abandoned their posts. Nagin also failed to position New Orleans’s mobile command center, a retrofitted eighteen-wheeler, in a safe, out-of-the-bowl place during the storm. Nagin, in fact, never explained what happened to the vehicle or why it was never put to immediate use after Katrina.

  Colonel Terry Ebbert, the director of New Orleans’s Office of Homeland Security and Public Affairs, ran the EOC at City Hall as the mayor used the Hyatt as his base. A decorated veteran of the Vietnam war, Ebbert had been on active duty in the Marine Corps for thirty-five years. Officially, he was in charge of public safety, whether the threat was criminal, terrorist, or natural. “The superintendents of the Police and Fire departments and the director of the Office of Emergency Preparedness report directly to me,” Ebbert said on assuming his post in 2003. “I report directly to the mayor.”83 When asked whether City Hall was structurally safe, Ebbert said yes, unable to explain Nagin’s insistence that for security reasons he couldn’t hunker down with the rest of his team.

  At 6 P.M., with the winds rising, a curfew ordered by Mayor Nagin had taken effect. By then it was like the last hour on Christmas Eve—too late to do any more. The big day was coming, ready or not.

  Chapter Four

  THE WINDS COME TO LOUISIANA

  I am the Rider of the wind,

  The Stirrer of the storm;

  The hurricane I left behind

  Is yet with lightning warm;

  To spe
ed to thee, o’er shore and sea

  I swept upon the blast.

  —Lord Byron, Manfred, act I, scene I

  I

  JOAQUIN “TONY” ZUMBADO WAS relaxing at home in Homestead, Florida, early on Sunday when his telephone rang. He’d been expecting a call and wondered if this was it. For twenty-eight years Zumbado had been freelancing for NBC News as a videographer. Muscular and fearless by nature, Zumbado was a “hurricane jock” who had made a specialty of capturing tropical storms on film, putting himself in harm’s way to get the most stunning footage imaginable. The fifty-one-year-old Zumbado, who wore wide-framed yellow-tinted glasses, had been born in Cuba but was raised in Miami. Somewhere in his polite demeanor, there was a streak of machismo, which was perhaps evident in his choice of pets: two rottweilers named Katie and Lulu. Zumbado, his wife, Lliam, and their three daughters had a family garage band—like the Partridge Family. They called themselves the Rockweilers. Tony was essentially a homebody, until the first palm fronds started to quake. Then he was all business.

  During the previous week, Zumbado had been on assignment, shooting film of Katrina as it blew across the metropolitan Miami-Dade area. He was impressed by the city, state, and federal response. Governor Jeb Bush—the President’s brother—and the emergency agencies on the scene executed a nearly flawless evacuation of hurricane-threatened areas. “Ever since Andrew, Florida has really gotten their act together as far as getting people evacuated, refusing to leave the disadvantaged behind,” Zumbado recalled in an October 2005 interview. “They figured out which way the storm was going and they started mobilizing people and you saw supplies pour in, depending on where the storm was going, and they had staging areas where trucks meet and prepare to distribute relief aid. And the Red Cross and FEMA were very hands-on, helping people within hours after the storm. It was impressive.”1